[aero142]

I would imagine in a libertarian world, these companies would all be sued in court. Why is this not happening now?

Edit: I broke my own rule, and hadn't finished the article. They are being sued. Hopefully if the facts hold up, the case succeeds. This seems like something that should have criminal punishment as well for the supplier.

[knz]

> I would imagine in a libertarian world, these companies would all be sued in court. Why is this not happening now?

Or we could decide that it's in our collective best interest to hold companies to certain standards and avoid frivolous lawsuits?

Politics exists on a spectrum. It is possible to be pro business but also have a strong state that acts in the best interests of its population. A government is meant to represent the people ("by the people, for the people")...

This was in the top Google results for "best countries to do business in" - http://www.doingbusiness.org/rankings

New Zealand, Singapore, Denmark, Hong Kong, South Korea, Norway, UK, USA, Sweden, Macedonia, Taiwan, Estonia, and Finland were the top results. Most of those have a healthy government.

[nickik]

Why should we spend tons of money on regulating every single item? That are cost that have to be payed by somebody.

Also its incredible difficulte to design these standard. Its almost impossible to remove bad ones because the burocracy has a clear interest in having asany as possible.

There is a clear insentive for regulatory capture. If you do it the libertarian way you just have universal courts that are much harder to be captured by interest groupes.

This system is superior to regulation because once you have, you have little ongoing cost. New products don't have built in extra cost as it would in a regulatory system and only if somebody bother to actually sue that person, one would have to spend money.

The money spent on the investigation is largly spend privatly. This means that the investigation is done effectivly, while a burocracy usually has the opposite insentive.

Also,any of the countries you mentioned are some of the most libertarian in the world. Look at the economic freedom index (doing buissness index is part of that).

[fucking_tragedy]

> only if somebody bother to actually sue that person, one would have to spend money. > The money spent on the investigation is largly spend privately.

This is why hardline libertarianism needs to revisit history and check with reality. Hundreds, thousands or millions of people shouldn't be injured or die before someone with enough money / evidence can sue or a class action lawsuit is brought before a court. Thousands of people shouldn't become addicted to or overdose from their laudanum infused snake oil. Children shouldn't have to die because their food, medicine or toys have easily prevented, harmful or deadly flaws. That was the norm before the FDA. People have a history of harming others for their own gain. Gone unchecked, it will happen regularly because the market will allow it. That is why we have regulatory agencies: we cannot rely on the market forces for absolutely everything.

[nickik]

Actually back before that FDA that was true because people were generally poor and could not buy quality. Evidence quite clearly shows that with growing wealth you also get improved quality. Product quality was rising steadily in the US way before the FDA, and when the FDA came along it did not radically improve, it continued on much the same path as before. Correlation is not Causation.

> That is why we have regulatory agencies: we cannot rely on the market forces for absolutely everything.

We have regulatory agencies because somebody thought regulatory agencies were a good idea. That something exits, is not prove that it works. Its not like these agencies get closed when they are doing a bad job.

Generally these bureaucracies just keep growing and attempting to ever increase the amount of detailed regulation in order to justify higher budget.

This is basic, well documented and tested political economy.

> This is why hardline libertarianism needs to revisit history and check with reality. Hundreds, thousands or millions of people shouldn't be injured or die before someone with enough money / evidence can sue or a class action lawsuit is brought before a court.

I have argued in other posts that the legal system is what is most important. In the case of the US the class action lawsuit has lots of problems, legal scholars and legal historians have designed and found much better ways of doing it.

Also, lets not ignore the millions of people who did because of the FDA. They have (actually had) a long history of waiting a long time to let dying people have medicine. In some cases they band useful medicine.

There is a hole history of such things that is often ignored.

[tracker1]

We already have these problems... The current system, and more socialized/communist systems aren't working any better.

[TeMPOraL]

When any of that happens it's a nationwide scandal and huge recalls are in order. That alone should tell you the system works quite well at making those situations very rare. Imagine what would happen without it.

[nickik]

That's simply a assertion. Recall cost a lot of money, companies have every intensive to avoid them. Just saying that everything happens because of regulation simply does not hold up as a argument if their are other or better explanations.

[tracker1]

Oh, like this national scandal regarding Aloe Vera that probably won't be on any major news network TV station, and there aren't any recalls happening?

[fma]

Difficult to design a standard?

Here's a good start: If your product doesn't contain enough of X, you can't call yourself X.

That's why ice cream that is not real ice cream is called 'frozen dairy dessert' and cheese that's not cheese is a 'cheese product'.

I'm not for regulating all the products, but I'm also not going to carry a MRI scanner around and determine exactly what is what.

[nickik]

A extremely generalisiere law like that is exactly what you would get out of a common law approach. If somebody sued somebody else about something the judge makes a judgment call about it, establishing a quasi standard. This quasi standard can then be revisited if needed.

The system that actually exists and many people here want is that every new product has to go threw a state facility that does testing and finds errors. Such a system actually exists and performs badly.

If a system of law is in action you can trust what you buy because you have trust that mass products are at least up to a minimum of standard. Sure, such a system probably does not find every detail. No system is perfect, a law based approach is generalized and low cost.

[drzaiusapelord]

How would a uneducated/non-expert jury parse this claim?

Tim Meadows, president of Concentrated Aloe Corp., said that nuclear magnetic resonance isn’t reliable for cosmetics because the presence of multiple ingredients can cause interference and there’s no way to test for aloe in finished products. He added that maltodextrin isn’t an adulterant because it can be used in the drying process, and while some ways of processing aloe remove acemannan, that doesn’t mean the aloe isn’t real, he said.

---

In other words, we don't really know the answer here and if consumers just ran to the nearest courthouse over every perceived slight in this Libertarian utopia, expect questionable jury settlements to be the norm, much like how our East Texas patent courts seem to have outcomes that are near random and demand settlements sometimes in the billions of dollars. I don't think "run to court" should be our first instinct here.

[CamperBob2]

You either trust the courts, or you don't.

If you do, then your takeaway from this article would be that the system is basically working as intended, at least so far.

If you don't, then you must be in favor of getting rid of the current jury system in favor of something else. What are your thoughts on how the replacement institution(s) should work?

[rhizome]

He's saying that just because they're selling caffeine-free, sugar-free diet Pepsi, that doesn't mean it's not Pepsi. That their cheese might be just canola oil and milk solids, but it's still orange. Just because the "aloe" (maybe call it "alow") they use has been eviscerated of all of its aloe-ness, that doesn't mean it didn't start out as natural aloe, and is that really what's important here?

[logfromblammo]

If you take an aloe plant and remove every quality and chemical that distinguishes it as aloe, it is no longer aloe. Homeopathy has no scientific merit. There is no distinguishable difference between pure, distilled water that has been sourced from clean lake water, or from seawater, or from urine, or from aloe plants. An H2O molecule has no capacity to store even a single bit of memory.

It is theoretically possible to perform organic synthesis with petroleum feedstocks to produce an artificial chemical mixture indistinguishable from natural aloe juice. But that would not be aloe, either. It would be imitation aloe. There is nothing inherently wrong or bad about imitation products, provided they are not presented in commerce as the genuine article. It might, after all, be an inferior and imperfect imitation, which would not be acceptable to consumers at the same prices.

The important issue is that people may believe that the bottled product is substantially similar to cutting a leaf from an aloe plant and squeezing out the juice from it. It is whether they are getting what they thought they paid for. If no chemical can be found in the product that can only economically be sourced from an aloe plant, clearly, the consumer has been cheated.

[drzaiusapelord]

If the medicinal action of Aloe is preserved I doubt anyone would feel "cheated."

[rhizome]

Yep.

[nickik]

The idea in such cases should never be that every single consumer sues the product seller.

Once we actually have suspicion the court or some private person can find another way to prove it. Since proving such a thing might be very value, there is lots of Incentives to do it. Whistle blowing might be interesting in this context.

One could also just look at their production, ask former employees and so on.

Does not seem impossible to handle.